Previews

This is Vegas

Forget living the life of crime. What if you just want to be a high-roller in a shiny shirt, here to party in the City of Sin?

Spiffy:

Wide open gameplay; lots of mini-games; goofy humor.

Iffy:

Gameplay rewards you for being a douche; but hey, it's Vegas.

This is Vegas aims to be a kind of open-ended Las Vegas simulation, but it's not simulating the real Las Vegas. It's more like you've stepped into the leading role of a National Lampoon movie, and you're going to tear this town a new one by living the dream. You know which dream I'm talking about: stiff booze, subservient women, high stakes gambling, fast driving, and in-your-face fighting.

While the game is open-ended, there's a method to your party-going madness. Billionaire fast-food tycoon Preston Bowyer wants to turn Vegas into a sterilized, family-friendly fun park, and it's up to you (and a cast of ludicrous extras from the city fringes) to get this party town back on track.

The gameplay demo we saw at E3 was nearly identical to the build we saw in April. See our earlier preview for details on the mechanics of the fighting, partying, and card-playing mini-games.

As we played through the demo this time around we focused on a couple of things, one of which was the wet tee-shirt contest. (Hey, nobody at Midway is trying to argue that this is a high-brow game).

We also paid attention to how the different game systems work together. The world is a dynamic, living place. So, if you're sitting at a casino playing Blackjack, stuff happens around you as the world goes about its business. Drunk guys stumble between the slot machines. Cocktail waitresses wander by (you can stop them and order drinks). Crowds gather to watch if you win a lot of money.

It turns out that Blackjack is a whole new game when you cheat, and in some ways it's a lot more interesting. In This is Vegas, the cards are marked, but not with their actual values. An "x" on a card means that it's either a face card or an ace, for instance, so there's some guesswork involved. Suddenly a run-of-the-mill game of Blackjack becomes a logic puzzle as you try to decipher what a dealer's holding, and you adopt new strategies, like drawing cards until an "x" shows up on the shoe that you know will almost certainly bust the dealer.

Unfortunately only Blackjack, poker, and slot machines are available for gaming, so the game won't mimic GameSpy's favorite pastime: high-stakes shirtless drunken craps.

But there's something to be said for the seamless open world. For instance, as we were playing Blackjack we spotted a car rotating above a bank of slot machines as a grand prize. "Can we vault over the slot machines, jump in the car, and drive it through the casino?" we asked. The answer? Yes.

This is Vegas definitely isn't for everyone. The sophomoric humor rewards players for acting like, well, total jerks. Not everyone will find it funny to beat up fluffy mascots with the assistance of a Frank Sinatralike, hijack a limo, then go into a club to set people on fire. But hey, we rarely get to act like jerks in real life, so if there's a game to help us unleash our inner "Animal House," we just might get on board.